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Join Joystiq at GaymerX2 this weekend
What are you doing this weekend? If you have some spare time and live around San Francisco, you're invited to hang out with Joystiq Editor-in-chief Ludwig Kietzmann and Managing Editor Susan Arendt at GaymerX2! Our dashing managerial duo is hosting and speaking on a panel called "Yes, and? An improvised approach to inclusion," which introduces a classic improv technique as a way to better communicate about difficult subjects within our existing social structures. As comedy writer and actress Tina Fey breaks down in Bossypants, saying "yes, and" is a trick to make sure an improv scene doesn't fall flat. First, you have to accept the given situation – say "yes" – and second, you have to add to it, or the conversation stalls out. For our purposes, if someone says an aspect of a game or story makes them uncomfortable, we don't need to debate that feeling – we can say yes, and then add our own perspectives to the conversation. GaymerX2 takes over the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco from July 11 - 13 – this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. GaymerX2 has a host of guests and panels lined up, including appearances by WWE star Darren Young, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and BioWare writer David Gaider (who'll be joining Ludwig and Susan). This is the final installment of the GaymerX conference series, but as President Toni Rocca told us earlier this year, GaymerX isn't dead. [Image: GaymerX]
All the World's a Stage: Yes, and...?
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.Roleplaying is, at its heart, a form of improv. Of course there are many differences between improv and roleplaying, but when you look at the actual practice of each, you can see that they both live and breathe by the same basic principles, and they both crash and die when these principles are ignored."Improv" is an interactive performance art that requires a certain level of training and rigor. The audience pays the actors to appear on stage, and the actors shape their performance around cues from the audience. It's entirely spontaneous, and as you can imagine, it can be quite crazy for an actor, not knowing what's going to happen next. To help with this, they use a special technique they call "Yes, and...?" which lets them handle whatever sorts of situations that might come up without getting thrown off-guard. Basically it means that each actor always accepts what the others say is true, and modifies the performance to go with whatever comes up. For example, if one actor says "hello mother" to another actor, now the one he spoke to is his mother for the duration of this scene. The "mother" accepts this new reality and offers something of her own in response, such as "Where have you been all night? Your father and I have been worried sick!" Alternatively if any actor denies what another actor just said or did, that's called "blocking," (as in, "No, I'm not your mother!") and it tends to stop the scene right there unless the initial actor can roll with it and accept it in his turn (as in, "Oh. I'm sorry... My mother was standing there a moment ago... I'm blind, you see...").
